The Null Device

2000/2/28

Rupert Murdoch's Festival/Mushroom music group gives exclusive digital distribution rights to mass retailer Sanity; in turn, HMV threatens a worldwide ban on Festival/Mushroom artists.

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More Echelon revelations (the-times.co.uk, via RobotWisdom)

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Meeting of minds? Helen "Demidenko" Darville to cover David Irving trial. (The Age)

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Good article on the evils of the major record labels:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label ... I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people... at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract...
The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.

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Benchmarks prove CP/M beats Windows NT in performance, security, stability, cost of ownership and customer satisfaction.

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A list of the many similarities between radical leftists and right-wing religiots (slightly US-centric).

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One more JBR piece: this time some entertaining speculations on English-language spelling reform, how/why it might be done, and why in reality it's bloody well impossible. (Btw, is "Featherstonehaugh" really pronounced "Fanshaw"?)

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